Writing the Harlem Renaissance

Revisiting the Vision

Contributions by Mary Lynn Chamber, Gerardo Del Guercio, Antonia Iliadou, Jacqueline C. Jones, Devona Mallory, Reginald Martin, Imani Michelle Scott, Christopher Varlack Edited by Emily Allen Williams

Not available to order

Publication date:

26 April 2017

Length of book:

140 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739196816

The contributors in this study examine the historical Harlem community during its renaissance period as well as its present-day community. A cursory investigation of the existent that focus on the Harlem community during its renaissance of the early twentieth century reveals that the compilations are primarily ones that present the subjects’ life stories through the lens of praise songs. This book, however, presents the Harlem community through a lens that reveals more grounded and researched analyses that bring the influences and contributions of the Harlem Renaissance to a level of relevance in the twenty-first century from one or more critical vantage points. This study aims to move beyond the more obvious and foregrounded artistic contributions towards analyses of the Harlem Renaissance alongside analyses of a twenty-first century Harlem community and its present day contributions.

Preface, Emily Allen Williams
Introduction, Reginald Martin
Part I: Writing the Harlem Renaissance: Spatial Representations and Memorandums of [Mis] Understanding
Chapter 1: The Greatest Joy in Life: Geraldyn Dismond’s Transformative Coverage of the Hamilton Lodge Ball, Jacqueline C. Jones
Chapter 2: Towards a Trans-Atlantic Approach: Tracing the Modernist Psychodrama and Wasteland Critique—the Poetry of the Political Imagination, Christopher Varlack
Chapter 3: The Impact of the Harlem Renaissance on the Development of the African American Voice within Literature, Mary Lynn Chambers
Part II: Blackness, Beauty, and Interracial Posturing: Sociological and Literary Representations
Chapter 4: DuBois and Larsen: The Convergence of Contrasting Literary Genres, Imani Michelle Scott
Chapter 5: Jean Toomer’s Cane in the Harlem Renaissance: Modernity, Individuality, and Language, Gerardo Del Guercio
Chapter 6: In Search of Our Mother’s Dignity: The Plight of African American Women in Selected Harlem Renaissance Literature, Devona Mallory
Chapter 7: Revisiting the “Mulatto” Stereotype in Passing and The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, Antonia Iliadou

Emily Allen Williams’s Writing the Harlem Renaissance: Revisiting the Vision offers a richly informed exploration of the contemporary and historical significance of the Harlem Renaissance. The contributors’ fresh excavations of this site of cultural flowering probe its wider intellectual, aesthetic, and humanistic scope. Their research turns attention to the movement’s diverse range of social, cultural, philosophical, and political interests that continue to elicit discerning scholarly insights. The book is most timely, moreover, as a centennial commemoration and revaluation of the legacy and continued promise of New Negro art. The illuminating perspectives from which the movement is reassessed include journalism, sociopolitical theory, sociology, philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, thereby validating Williams’s perception of the Harlem Renaissance as a multivocal venture that holds vital significance for a global array of creators and thinkers. These new excavations emphasize the literature’s capacity to speak ‘beyond the mystical theoretical imaginings’ often identified with the aesthetic outpouring of the movement. The volume positions the literature at an enlightening philosophical juncture where architects of culture and society are emboldened to unroll the past, thus to understand the present, and move meaningfully into the future.